Extraordinary Adventures

By Suzy Soto

Cayman was known as "The Islands that time forgot". However, Bob Soto woke it up when he started the world's first scuba diving company in 1957. He brought it to great success with his talent for marketing. Bob produced Cayman's first promotional film, to advertise the island's sun, sea, sand and amazing underwater beauty. With his permission, the Department of Tourism used the movie as their main advertising tool for many years. It was not long before the Cayman Islands became the top scuba diving destination in the world and Bob Soto's Diving became internationally renowned alongside it.

 

Bob provided the only sea search-and-rescue operation from the time he returned to Cayman. Many times day and night Bob was called out to assist in searching for people and boats. He was always available to help anyone. His experience with the US Navy carried over well into his operations here. 

 

Bob also championed conservation issues, lobbying the government to designate the first protected marine park for his beloved sea creatures and the coral reefs. Bob stopped divers and snorkelers from taking coral long before there was an actual conservation movement or any law established to protect the marine environment, thus preserving his island's "treasures". 

 

His uncanny problem-solving ability enabled him to invent and build his own scuba equipment, attracting increasing numbers of tourists to experience Cayman's magnificent underwater world with Bob Soto's Diving.

 

He was always working on the "next" adventure, leading to his incredible tales of treasure hunting and pioneering live-aboard diving. As the business grew, Bob eventually built a dive lodge in East End.

 

Bob was a Christian man. He was kind, gentle, and loving, always with a smile, but not to be crossed! He had a passion to honor others, as evidenced by his work on "Tradition," the memorial to seamen, which has become a favorite statue in Heroes Square in George Town, where thousands have taken photos alongside the father and son steering a ship into the "abyss". In November 2014, he had the Home Guard veterans honored with all their names etched on the cenotaph in front of the Elmslie Memorial Church. When you visit Cayman, do not miss it!

 

Come along on Bob Soto's "extraordinary adventures" of scuba diving; treasure hunting; sailing; rafting; and tasting life in Cayman when there were no planes, just ships, donkeys and catboats for transportation. Journey with Bob from the "Islands that time forgot" to modern-day Cayman.

 

This is Bob's story. He tells it straight from the heart.

• Language: English
• Publisher: CLM Publishing
• Release date: Apr 23, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201689346

Suzy Soto

Suzy Soto moved to the Cayman Islands in 1963 with her then-husband, Eric Bergstrom, and their three young daughters; later two sons were added to the family.  They built the Tortuga Club, a resort offering diving and fishing in undeveloped Colliers, East End, operating it for 18 years. Suzy has been intrinsically connected to tourism in Cayman ever since those early days. She enjoys sailing and has an adventurous spirit well matched by Bob Soto, who she married in 1981. She started the perennially popular Cracked Conch restaurant in West Bay the year they wed.  Requests from Tortuga Club guests prompted her to write her first book, in 1996, “Cookin' & Laughin'…in the Cayman Islands,” which sold out.  In 2006, she built the Sir Turtle Beach Villas in Little Cayman, which she still owns. Suzy received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Cayman Culinary Society in 2015. She remains committed to community service and is well known in Cayman for her work with the Cayman Heart Fund, which she founded and is now Chair Emeritus. In her spare time, she loves to swim, bicycle and paint. Suzy and Bob share a combined eight children, 19 grandchildren and six great-grandchildren.

Book preview

PROLOGUE

Bob used to tell me the most incredible stories. At first, I listened with disbelief, thinking he must be exaggerating because no one could do all this stuff! I soon learned that these crazy things were true! One day I told him, Your life has been so amazing, so extraordinary and unbelievable, it has to be recorded and put into a book.

So we started from the very beginning. This has been such an honor to record his story in his own words and for us to relive his life together. Our 34-year marriage was blessed; it is my promise to him to complete this book, as he wished, and to carry on his passions and to ensure our family, Caymanians, and all those who love the sea, adventure and life, know and remember this unique and extraordinary man! His story is a testament to believing and living your dream and never giving up.

Cayman was known as The Islands that time forgot. However, Bob Soto woke it up when he started the world’s first scuba diving company in 1957. He brought it to great success with his talent for marketing. Bob produced Cayman’s first promotional film, to advertise the island’s sun, sea, sand and amazing underwater beauty. With his permission, the Department of Tourism used the movie as their main advertising tool for many years. It was not long before the Cayman Islands became the top scuba diving destination in the world and Bob Soto’s Diving became internationally renowned alongside it.

Bob provided the only sea search-and-rescue operation from the time he returned to Cayman. Many times day and night Bob was called out to assist in searching for people and boats. He was always available to help anyone. His experience with the US Navy carried over well into his operations here.

Bob also championed conservation issues, lobbying the government to designate the first protected marine park for his beloved sea creatures and the coral reefs. Bob stopped divers and snorkelers from taking coral long before there was an actual conservation movement or any law established to protect the marine environment, thus preserving his island’s treasures.

His uncanny problem-solving ability enabled him to invent and build his own scuba equipment, attracting increasing numbers of tourists to experience Cayman’s magnificent underwater world with Bob Soto’s Diving.

He was always working on the next adventure, leading to his incredible tales of treasure hunting and pioneering live-aboard diving. As the business grew, Bob eventually built a dive lodge in East End.

Bob was a Christian man. He was kind, gentle, and loving, always with a smile, but not to be crossed! He had a passion to honor others, as evidenced by his work on Tradition, the memorial to seamen, which has become a favorite statue in Heroes Square in George Town, where thousands have taken photos alongside the father and son steering a ship into the abyss. In November 2014, he had the Home Guard veterans honored with all their names etched on the cenotaph in front of the Elmslie Memorial Church. When you visit Cayman, do not miss it!

Come along on Bob Soto’s extraordinary adventures of scuba diving; treasure hunting; sailing; rafting; and tasting life in Cayman when there were no planes, just ships, donkeys and catboats for transportation. Journey with Bob from the Islands that time forgot to modern-day Cayman.

This is Bob’s story. He tells it straight from the heart and it will warm your soul.

-Suzy Soto

Chapter One

THE BEGINNING: 1920s

This story should begin with my mother, Daisy Bodden Drigors, a strong Caymanian woman who left her home in the 1920s to travel and find work in Cuba to support herself and her family. In those days, there was very little to do in Cayman for a young woman to earn a living. She went to Herona, the Isle of Pines, and found work in a canning factory and spent happy years there among other family members.

My grandfather was Capt. James Shearer Bodden (also known as Allan), and he married Mary Catherine Thompson. My family, as far back as I can remember, came from the Boddens, and the Thompsons on my mother’s side. My grandfather had a brother who moved to Cayman Brac and may have been responsible for the Bodden families there.

My grandfather’s sister went to the Bay Islands in Honduras. Shearer and Mimi had three daughters --Ruby, Jenny and Daisy, my mother. They also had a son, Allen Bodden, who immigrated to Mobile, Alabama, when he was 16. My mother and her two sisters went to Cuba along with my grandmother Mimi’s sister and her husband, so we had an extended family in Cuba, in the '20s.

The economic situation in Cayman after World War I was terrible, as it was even before the war. There was no work in Cayman so they went to Cuba for employment. Cuba was a great agricultural country in the „20s and earlier. My father, Marcos Ramiro Soto Pantoja, who was of Spanish descent, and his parents came from Spain, around the time of the Spanish-American War in 1898, and then stayed on in Cuba.

My Aunt Jenny and my mother worked in the fruit-packing houses on the Isle of Pines, from where fruit and vegetables were exported to Florida, with oranges, grapefruit, tangerines, cucumbers, tomatoes and sugar being packed up and shipped out. The depression came along in the „30s and things got bad in Cuba so one of my aunts moved to Tampa. My Aunt Jenny had two children, a daughter and a son who remained in Cuba.

I was born August 25, 1926. Two years after I was born in Cuba, there was a terrible hurricane that wiped out the Isle of Pines. It blew down the house that we were living in so my mother used a door to float me to safe ground. There was a huge devastation for the whole Isle of Pines. So, I wasn’t drowned there as a baby in the hurricane, though the seas came into Jerona, Isle of Pines. I guess I’m lucky to be alive today.

The packing warehouses closed down in Cuba and my mother, two brothers, Haldine and Rene, and I moved back to Cayman in 1928. That is how we got back to Cayman and grew up there in the „30s and „40s. I suppose we returned to Cayman because my grandfather and grandmother were still alive and we had a home there to go back to, located across from the Lobster Pot, at the family estate. A little bit later, my sister, Gay, came along. That is how we were raised, with our mother and grandparents.

It was not an easy decision to move; however, she felt it better for her boys. And that was the true beginning for me.

Chapter Two

BOYHOOD IN CAYMAN: 1930s

A small thing a candy apple, yet when one is young it can make a very large impression. For me, it created a fierce determination that drove me toward success.

We used to have regattas in the 1930s, and they were always a holiday. I loved the festivities and the excitement. They used to hold them where the North Terminal is now located in George Town. There was a warehouse and dock and we would gather around all the boats. There was a cove where all the catboats and skiffs would be racing.

My grandfather, who they called Capt. Shearer, was an old turtle fisherman and a sea captain. He had a skiff with a centerboard made out of wood, about 1½ inches thick, that was built in Alabama by my Uncle Allan Bodden Jr.., named after my grandfather, who had left Cayman when he was 16 years old, never to return. He worked in Alabama, raised his family and died there. When I was about six years old, he sent the skiff out on the Explicit, a big three-master sailing schooner that sailed between Mobile, Cayman, and Jamaica, hauling freight. The skiff was very fast and all the young men in those days would fight to get to sail it.

The wreck of the Balboa was in the George Town harbor, after the ship went down in the 1932 hurricane. One side of it was out of the water and I remember Will Wallace, Atherton Bodden and other young men were out there working for days in the hot sun, with chisels and hacksaws, to cut a plate out of the side of the Balboa to make a metal centerboard for the skiff, which would not create as much drag as the wooden one. They did this so they could get to sail the boat. Sometimes, I would get to go out on a race on the boat as a bailer to bail the water out; that was all I could do, I was so small.

As part of the festivities, they had food and I remember they had these big red candy apples. Oh my God, my saliva was drooling down the sides of my mouth for one of them, and I never had a penny in my pocket to buy one. I remember this beautiful blue-eyed lady, Marie, who was married to Loxley Arch. She was Sam Parson’s daughter and was running this stand selling sweets and things for all the kids and adults. I would just stand there and look at that apple, wondering what it would taste like to get that thing in my mouth; it was so beautiful and red. Anyway, I never got one.

Later on when I grew up and went to the States, in 1948 I went to Coney Island up in New York to ride the Cyclone roller coaster, and jump in parachutes and stuff like that. They had those candy apples up there and I bought one. I bit into the damn thing, and it was rotten. I said, Oh my God, the apple was over ripe. I’m sure it would have been much better if the apple was fresh! You know, all these years I dreamed of this, this apple, and when I got it, it was just awful. What a disappointment it was. Ah, boy, those were some days!

HITCHIN’ A RIDE

I was about 6 years old and we were playing down the street; in those days the roads were just full of sand. They had a trail of roads going from George Town to West Bay. The Arches not only built boats, but a lot of them were preachers. I believe it was Elroy Arch who used to go to West Bay doing missionary work and, in the evenings, to preach. I don’t know for certain, but I guess it must have been a Sunday evening. He had this big old black car and what they call a luggage rack on the back of it. We were playing in the streets and this car came by me and my brother Rene. He was about 8 or 9 years old. I started running behind this car and I jumped up on it and sat down. He kept running after me telling me to jump off, jump off and the car kept going faster and faster and I was afraid to jump off „cause if I jumped, my feet couldn’t go fast enough to keep up with the car. I just knew I was gonna get killed. I wouldn’t get off, so he jumped onto the back with me. The people in the car didn’t know we were there.

We were holding on for dear life on the back of that car going to West Bay, with the sand from the road stinging our legs which were hanging down. Elroy, he’s zoomin’ down there, boy, and we finally get into West Bay by what they called Aunt Sally’s breadfruit tree, where the four-way gas station is. Right in front of that was an old walled house. I guess it belonged to Aunt Sally, whoever she was. The big breadfruit tree was right in the middle of the road. You had to drive around it and when he slowed down by the tree, we leaped off.

My God, going to West Bay was like going to another country; it seemed to me like it was a hundred miles away. At that moment, it was dusk, and we ran down to the beach. We never went back to the road and we ran all the way from West Bay, never stopping till we got to Pageant Beach. When we got down there I could hear, Bobicito, Bobicito! that was my mother, yellin’ for us. Some of the other boys had seen us get on the back of the car. We heard her hollering for us and we showed up and got a damn whipping for doing it, so we never did that anymore.

GOING FISHININ’

My grandfather sometimes used to take me sailing to West Bay. He would load the boat with baskets of breadfruits. He had the biggest yard with three or four of the biggest breadfruit trees --five or six feet around and they were so huge, the best breadfruits on the island were there. He used to load them up on the boat and sail to West Bay. I guess those Westbayers, they knew when he was comin’, „cause he would carry them down there. They never had breadfruits in West Bay in those days and they never had mangoes. So he would carry them down there and exchange them with the old turtle fishermen he knew. Corned turtle, dried turtle, sweet potatoes, anything they had that he didn’t have, they would barter for it. We would then sail back to George Town. Ah, I enjoyed those trips with him.

He would troll with a big old cotton line. He would fish while he would sail back and forth, and he would put his foot on the rail and tie the line on his big toe. I thought the fish were gonna drag him overboard.

We were trolling for wahoo. He would have that leg cocked up on the boat and when that fish bit, he would push it out straight to set the hook and the damn fish would go with him, and he would grab that line and pull it in; I couldn’t do it, the fish was so heavy, so big. He hauled the fish in. I thought it would drag him overboard, or cut his toe off. He was a tough old man. The bottoms of his feet had calluses on them, and his hands were hard as rocks. He’d grabbed hold of you, even at 80 years old. If he grabbed you and squeezed you, he could break your bones, he was so strong.

We used to take his boat and go sail. Boy, he used to hate that. He didn’t trust us to take the boat. He would be on the shore cussing and fussing till we came back in. Sometimes we had to anchor the boat, jump overboard and swim away from him; we dared not go ashore and had to wait till he was asleep, late at night, to come in. We were afraid he would beat us. He trusted the older ones more than the younger ones.

Finally, he got me a canoe so I wouldn’t bother his boat again. A beautiful little